Will Congress kill YouTube and Twitter?

by October 26th, 2011

A post over at Daily Kos alerted us to the Internet Blacklist Bill, which the House introduced today. The bill could hold sites like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook responsible for user-generated content uploaded to their servers. Post author and Rhode Island state congressman David Segal warns that if the the bill passes as-is, it would:

1) Give the government and private corporations new powers to block access to sites accused of copyright infringement;

2) Criminalize the streaming of copyrighted content;

3) Restrict cloud-based storage services, music lockers, and the like;

4) Create the aforementioned new liabilities for sites that encourage the posting of user-generated content.

“Nobody will want to take that risk,” says Segal, “So these sites and others could be forced to shut down if it manages to pass as it stands.
Some members of the KOS community question the urgency of the bill:JamesGG:

This has the potential to completely kill one of their top revenue sources in YouTube.

I’d think that if [Google] thought this stood a chance, “condemn” would be the least they’d do with their billions of dollars post-Citizens-United.